Portable radio receivers and transceivers, such as wireless pagers, have become increasingly popular as a means of communication. Pagers are typically carried by users who wish or need to receive communications when they are away from a telephone or computer, or are unable to predict where they may be reached at a given time.
In general, the user of a pager purchases the unit and enters into a contact with a service provider. As shown in FIG. 1, when someone 12 wishes to page a particular user, they contact the user's service provider 11, identify the user to be paged (perhaps with a personal identification number), and may give a message to the service provider 11 that is to be broadcast to the user's pager 15.
The service provider 11 maintains a network of radio transceiver base stations 13, 14 which are spread throughout the service area covered by the service provider. The transmitting base stations 13 are distributed so that transmissions from at least one base station can be received by a pager 15 anywhere in the service area.
In a simplistic system, when the service provider 11 receives a request to page a user 15, the page is broadcast by all the base stations 13 in the system. Thus, if the pager 15 is located anywhere in the service area, it will receive the page. The pager 15 will then alert the user that a page has been received with, for example, an audible or vibratory alert signal.
In a more sophisticated system, the pager 15 may have the capability to not only receive a transmission from the service provider's system, but may have the capability to transmit an answer back to the system. This is referred to as two-way paging.
With these advances, the usefulness of pagers as a means of communication has expanded rapidly. Service providers have encouraged this expansion by experimenting with pagers as a means to disseminate information of interest to pager users. For example, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,508,695 to Nelson et al., incorporated herein by reference, a one-way pager system is used to relay sports or financial information to a pager user who has contracted with the service provider for that service.
However, there are many potential, undiscovered applications of pager technology which may provide pager users with, as yet unheard of, abilities to communicate. This is particularly true of the developing two-way pager systems. Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods and applications of pager technology to meet the information and communication demands of pager users.
Movies theaters are also of great popularity in modern society. Theaters with a multitude of screens showing a wide variety of movies throughout the day and evening are now common. However, it can be extremely burdensome to locate a movie theater with an interesting or acceptable movie showing at a convenient time if one does not have a newspaper, or phone book and telephone for guidance. This is particularly true if the decision to attend a movie is made spontaneously, perhaps when one is already away from home.
Thus, there is a further need for a means of communicating movie theater locations, movies being shown and show times to interested members of the public. There is also a need to be able to request and obtain such information from any location without the need to locate a newspaper, telephone or theater phone number.